Neighbourhoods, Streets and Communities

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Neighbourhoods, Streets and Communities
Jon Lang MUDD Program, UNSW 3rd July 2008
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Community?

• There are a number of definitions
• The people living in an area
• An interacting populations of individuals in a
  common location
• A group of people with a common interest.
• 
  Websters New Encyclopedic Dictionary
  (1993) 199

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• Streets and Communities
• The primary role of streets is to give access
  streets also act as
• edges or they can act
• as seams for everyday life and community
• formation.
• The urban design issue
• When do we give primacy to traffic flows and when
  to the street as a seam as a set of behaviour
  settings?

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Communities?

• Socio-Psychological
• - Formal Organization
• - Communal Organization
• Physical
• - Precincts
• - Neighbourhoods
• - Face-blocks
• - Buildings

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Organizational TypesFormal Organizations

• They are held together by contract
• They can be designed
• Communal Organizations
• They are held together by social norms
• They cannot be designed they grow from the
  grassroots

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Types of socio-physical communities

• The total territorial community
• -- the cresive community
• The community of limited-liability
• and
• The administered community
• The designed community

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A total community?
Collection of the author
Photograph by
Carolina Calderon

A pol, Ahmedabad
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An administered community

GSFC Township Vadodara (Baroda), India B. V.Doshi
and the Vastu Shilpa Foundation, urban designers
and architects
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Wenxinyuan, Hankou

• Design principles
• walled and gated
• a hierarchy of formal organizations
• - block
• - street
• - building.
• Is it a designed community or an administered
  community?

Source Bray (2006)
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A designed community A cohousing example

Trudeslund, Denmark
Vankustein, architects
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The search for community through urban design

• Design Ideas
• The standard model for decomposing a city into
  its parts
• The neighbourhood unit updated
• The vertical neighbourhood
• The role of streets in all these examples?

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The generic urban decomposition model


Source Hester (1975)

A specific case Columbia, Maryland, USA Rouse
Corporation Property Developers.
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The neigbourhood unit

• Design Principles
• A well-bounded area (good contour)
• Communal facilities at the core
• ¼ mile (400 metres) walking distance from the
  periphery to the core
• Shopping and apartment buildings at the
  intersections with neighbouring units
• 
  
  Clarence Perry

Source Regional Plan of New York, 1929
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The Radburn (New Jersey, USA) plan
Source Gallion and
Eisner, 1975

The plan as built
A cul--de-sac
Clarence Stein and Henry Wright designers (Late
1920s)
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Radburn

An underpass
A walkway from the back of houses to the
central park
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The first generation British new towns


Source Runcorn
Development Corporation (1967)
Runcorn, England (1970s)
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A pedestrian pocket proposal
Source Kelbaugh (1989)

Collection of the author
The generic idea
An example
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New Urbanism and neighbourhood design

• A neighbourhood should have
• A discernible centre
• Buildings in the centre built to the property
  line
• Dwellings within a 5minute walk from the centre
• A variety of dwelling types
• Shops and offices at the periphery
• An elementary school within walking distance of
  houses
• A playground within 1/8 mile (200metres)
• A connected network of streets
• and
• A formal self-governing organization
• 
  Source Andres Duany and Elizabeth
  Plater Zyberk Architects, Inc.

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The neighbourhood unit updated, 1994

• Design Principles
• ¼ mile walking distance
• 160 acres bounded by boulevards
• shops bus stop at the centre
• school shared with adjacent areas
• mixed use main street
• offices etc parking on boulevards

Duany and Platter Zyberk, architects
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The image of the main street


Source Jackson
(2006) Proposal for Fullerton, California 2006
100 homes, 300,000 sq feet (27871sq metres)
commercial space
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Example Playa Vista, Los Angeles



Source Katz (1994) 186
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US Patent 6688052- Neighborhood housing
arrangement

(2004)
Source http//drflandershometown.com/HT20PICTURES
20PAGE2001.htm
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The Rationalist Response A vertical
neighbourhood

Source Richards (1962)
The Unité d habitation, Marseilles, France Le
Corbusier, architect
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A district of vertical neighbourhoods

Buildings set in open space
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The modern version?
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• The street as seam
• Why bother?

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Streets as nested sets of behaviour
settings
Remember such observations as these are
culture-bound!
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A University-Town Community
A Neo-Traditionalist
approach

Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
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Traffic and face-block neighbourhoods
The higher the traffic volume the less the
communication across streets
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Stage in life cycle and mobility
Source Michael
Southworth
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Children the true neighbourhood people?

Source The Smithsons
Question What do we do with observations such as
this one?
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A study of childrens play areas


Source Randolph Hester, Neighborhood
Space
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The woonerf or shared street
Source
Southworth and Ben Joseph, 1996
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The cul-de-sacNo longer a viable option? Too
old-fashioned?
Its a favoured play space for children
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Recognizing the limitations of planning and design

• Creating opportunities for the formation of
  community
• (i.e., communities of limited liability)

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What can we do today?

• In creating a sense of community in a
  neigbourhood or in a building
• Design a central node
• Create a boundary
• Create an image of similarity of buildings
• Create formal organizations
• Create opportunities/catalysts for social
  meeting.
• The most one can expect to achieve is a community
  of limited liability but also one rich in
  informal learning opportunities for children.

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A community of limited liability

Collection of the author

Millennium Village, Greenwich, London, England,
UK Ralph Erskine, Urban Designer and Architect
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A college community

Kresge College, University of California at Santa
Cruz Moore and Turnbull, architects
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A community of scholars?A designed community

• The National Center for the Humanities, North
  Carolina, USA
• Hartman Cox, Architects

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Conclusion

• Remember
• We can design formal organizations
• We cannot design communal ones
• We can create opportunities (affordances) for the
  development of communal organizations
• But
• Most depends on the people involved and their
  aspirations

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The quality of streets is fundamental in the
quality of communities

• They can be seams for everyday life
• They are multi-purpose spaces
• They establish the character of any development
• Remember
• streets are three dimensional not just the
  roadbed they are enclosed by buildings
• A street wants to be a room
• 
  
  Louis I Kahn

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The character of streets shapes the character
of neighbourhoods


Photographs by Jesus Lara
Source Croc (2005)
Main Street, Moapa Valley, Nevada
and an alternative
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Thank you
Jon Lang